Computer data is vital to today's organizations and a significant part of protection against disasters is focused on data protection. Existing data protection systems may provide continuous data protection, meaning that every change made to data is backed up.
Ransomware attacks are increasing prevalent. In a typical attack, the attacker installs a virus on a victim host (e.g., a desktop or server computer) that replaces files on the host with encrypted versions of those files. If strong encryption is used, the original files can practically only be recovered using a secret key held by the attacker. The attacker may demand payment in exchange for the secret key.